Dave's Brain

Date: 2009sep11
Distro: Fedora
Q. How do you install the Arduino IDE on Fedora?
A. The instructions here
http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Linux/Fedora
are fine with the addition of the following:
The instructions say you should add the user who is going to use the IDE
to the "uucp" group. Actually on Fedora, you should add the user to the "dialout"
group. Because that group owns the /dev/ttyUSB0 device.
I installed it in /usr/bin/arduino-0017 but you can put it anywhere.
You run file /usr/bin/arduino-0017/arduino to launch the IDE. But I noticed
that you have to be that folder for it to work. So I made a small script
in /usr/bin/arduino-0017/start_arduino which simply does:

#!/bin/sh
cd `dirname $0`
exec ./arduino

And make it executable:

chmod a+x /usr/bin/arduino-0017/start_arduino

Also its nice (but not necessary) to have access to the IDE from a menu.
To make that happen just create /usr/share/applications/arduino.desktop
which contains: